Big surprise, Google continued to reign over all other U.S. search engines in January with 66.2 percent share, according to data released today by market researcher ComScore.

Not only did Google overshadow all other engines, it also managed to take some of Yahoo's traffic and grow by 0.3 percentage points.

Yahoo did not have it easy last month--users' searches decreased by 0.4 percent putting it at 14.1 percent share. It was the only search engine not to increase share or at least keep the status quo in January.

Now, Microsoft has 15.2 percent share, growing 0.1 percent in January. Other search engines retained small percent shares, such as Ask with 3 percent and AOL with 1.6 percent. These numbers calculated by ComScore are only for explicit core searches, which are what people manually enter on a Web page.

In December, overall queries rose by 2 percent, however in January they fell by 2 percent. In total, people made 17.8 billion explicit core searches last month. Google nabbed the first ranking (of course) with 11.8 billion, Microsoft had 2.7 billion, and Yahoo had 2.5 billion searches. Google and Microsoft's overall queries fell by 2 percent and Yahoo was down 5 percent.

Google's "powered by" searches, which include those at its own sites along with Google-branded searches at AOL and Ask, seized 68.4 percent of all organic searches--up from 68.1 percent in December. Microsoft's "powered by" searches, which cover those at Bing and Yahoo, captured 26.5 percent of all organic searches with no change from December.

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Dara Kerr is a staff reporter for CNET focused on the sharing economy and tech culture. She grew up in Colorado where she developed an affinity for collecting fool's gold and spirit animals.
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